Simply by turning on remote cache read/write settings to an appropriate remote store address I mean

From my experimentation, it doesn't seem like it interacts with the remote cache

Not the best at reading the source code, but I do see the

PER_SESSION

cache scope configuration here

I guess I don't need the symlinked venv to be the thing that's cached and I'm likely confusing the intent of that feature

I more just want to not have ephemeral CI runners rebuild pexes every time they want a virtual environment

Getting all our CI runners off using virtual environments is a longer effort

So I guess the last part of this investigation is why is making a venv so slow when I don't have any local cache. I can see if I point to a silly remote cache that there are errors about it being unreachable. So I know it's reaching out to the remote cache for something.

Successive

pants export

calls are very fast, but if I blow away local cache and rerun that part is always slow

I can see this venv pex being successfully remotely cached and retrieved. Why might it be taking 6 minutes to retrieve something?

15:47:12.93 [DEBUG] remote cache hit for: "Build pex for resolve `python-default`" digest=Digest { hash: Fingerprint<b2adbffc0781dde3e3b2cac57273c63e3bd151c094418b64ab9dfeb181a4b2c5>, size_bytes: 142 } response=FallibleProcessResultWithPlatform { stdout_digest: Digest { hash: Fingerprint<e3b0c44298fc1c149afbf4c8996fb92427ae41e4649b934ca495991b7852b855>, size_bytes: 0 }, stderr_digest: Digest { hash: Fingerprint<e3b0c44298fc1c149afbf4c8996fb92427ae41e4649b934ca495991b7852b855>, size_bytes: 0 }, exit_code: 0, output_directory: DirectoryDigest { digest: Digest { hash: Fingerprint<7c1f0a76ba01093be9aef4811bdf1ce447533a9a579e09ce9ab4f6bd6c13e315>, size_bytes: 93 }, tree: "Some(..)" }, metadata: ProcessResultMetadata { total_elapsed: Some(Duration { secs: 356, nanos: 935175537 }), saved_by_cache: None, source: HitRemotely, environment: ProcessExecutionEnvironment { name: None, platform: Linux_x86_64, strategy: Local }, source_run_id: RunId(2) } }

The

secs

field is

356

though

I know that my vpn was throttling my connection speed to ~13 Mbps

So with that fetch time, it suggests that my file size was somewhere 500MB+

Does that sounds like right order of magnitude for a pex made by

pants export

?

I could convince myself of that if it's a large venv

Would be great to confirm the size manually